Sitting in my motel room at 11 p.m., getting horizontal and unwinding after a Colorado chase day, I noticed faint flashes out the window, and on radar, an intensifying, lengthening band of elevated thunderstorms to the west, moving mostly eastward. That reinvigorated me for a short trip down the Interstate to meet them. The richly complicated cloud layers over the gust front made a wonderful … [Read more...]
Weak, Scuddy Spinup
For less than a minute, under the broader, flatter wall cloud, this persistent, scuddy, rotating lowering yielded rising, modestly rotating tendrils of scud that coiled up from the surface. Moistened considerably by at least two storms' cores (this one and another to the north-northeast), as well as rain the previous day, the weakly tornadic circulation couldn't raise dust. Nonetheless, with a … [Read more...]
More Blue-Hour Blasts
As if it weren't enough for this slowly dying supercell to fling one magnificent barrage of electricity out into all directions of the twilight sky (including miles of clear air nearly to overhead), it did so again! Meanwhile, that Okie pumpjack just kept on bobbing in the short, wide-angle time exposure until the lightning flashed and I closed the shutter. This storm, and the one that … [Read more...]
Small but Promising
Following the strange and unexpected little dust-tube tornado near Dumont, we figured this storm would have more potential as it moved into greater low-level moisture, while remaining discrete. The next mesocyclone soon formed, quickly forming this sharply contrasted, feisty little rotating wall cloud, with fast rising motion in the tail at right. Alas, this new circulation would wait until it … [Read more...]
Undulations
Though the storm still was distant, the Big Sky Country clarity famously came through. A deep zoom across a roadless and inaccessible area traveled much further than I could, bringing out interesting features of a then outflow-dominant supercell churning its way along the Wyoming/Montana borderlands. Above and in front of the storm: undular warm-advection clouds, darkened by shadowing from the … [Read more...]
Boundary Supercell
Viewed at wide angle, a small supercell seems even tinier in the context of the tremendous amount of cloud material it already has processed, to the extent one wonders how so much mass can be pumped aloft through such a narrow chimney, including all the rain and hail being condensed from it. The secret's in the spin. Not the political kind, but literally: the internal dynamics of the rotating … [Read more...]
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